Texas largely relies on natural gas especially during times of high demand to power the state. However, for days now, the state has been in utter darkness. What could’ve been the cause?
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Texas largely relies on natural gas especially during times of high demand to power the state. However, for days now, the state has been in utter darkness. What could’ve been the cause?
The news had it that some of the generating equipment has frozen up in the extreme cold and was taken offline. Texas receives about 25% of all it’s power from wind generation and the majority of those windmills have frozen in place-useless, which underscores the fact that renewable energy is dangerous unless it’s backed up by either a natural gas or coal fired emergency power source.
Unprecedented cold temperatures put a heavy demand on electricity and natural gas supplies as state residents desperately tried to remain warm in their homes. For environmental reason most coal-fired power plants had been either taken off line or converted to natural gas. The west Texas wind turbines on which much of the state depended for electricity were frozen by the ice and cold and became inoperable. Meanwhile the extreme demands on the state’s natural gas supplies forced several of the gas fired electrical generating plants to go off-line.
Not surprisingly, to avoid complete shut-downs when the grid demands exceeded the available supply of electricity, rolling blackouts were initiated by the grid operators while trying to maintain essential services such as hospitals, firefighting facilities and law enforcement.
My thoughts are this. Most of our country’s power infrastructure is not designed for and maintained to be able to operate normally during the most extreme conditions. Doing so would result in those “extra” resources to be idled except during those extreme demands. Our transition from coal-generated power to intermittent renewable power will require alternative non-polluting sources of base power to be added to the mix. Some of us believe that proven, compact factory-built modular nuclear power plants distributed throughout our grid is the answer. Some are currently being evaluated.